29 September 2014

The final stage in milkweed's life cycle is a magnificent aerial dispersal of its seeds. The dried pods, remants of those huge blossoms, crack open and several hundred aerodynamic seeds are exposed to the wind; this happens gradually, over a period of days rather than all at once, presumably to maximize the range of distribution of their landing sites.

I hope that every child (and the inner child of every adult) has had or will have the opportunity to hold a dried stem aloft and shake it gently on an autumn day. One can't help but marvel at how this immensely effective dispersal mechanism has evolved over the millennia.

Those who raise milkweed in butterfly gardens need to be aware that neighbors may not share their enthusiasm for the plant. We cut down the stems of all our plants just before the pods open. The seeds are then available for "stealth gardening" along roadsides or in wastelands.

For those who want to distribute the seeds by hand in a more controlled fashion, the seeds can be separated from the fluff (the coma), or even more simply just digitally removed from a mature but unopened pod (instructive video here).

(and yes, I know it's actually a "seedcast," not a podcast, but I couldn't resist using the word)

The flaw has been found in a software component known as Bash, which
is a part of many Linux systems as well as Apple's Mac operating system. The bug, dubbed Shellshock, can be used to remotely take control of almost any system using Bash, researchers said...

"Whereas something like Heartbleed was all about sniffing what was
going on, this was about giving you direct access to the system," Prof
Alan Woodward, a security researcher from the University of Surrey, told
the BBC.

"The door's wide open."

Some 500,000 machines worldwide were thought to have been
vulnerable to Heartbleed. But early estimates, which experts said were
conservative, suggest that Shellshock could hit at least 500 million
machines...

"Using this vulnerability, attackers can potentially take over the
operating system, access confidential information, make changes, et
cetera," said Tod Beardsley, a Rapid7 engineer...

For general home users worried about security, Prof Woodward suggested
simply keeping an eye on manufacturer websites for updates -
particularly for hardware such as broadband routers.

More at the link. I would welcome comments from some of the informed readers of this blog.

There is “widespread censorship” of books in US prisons, according to
a report submitted to a UN human rights review, which details the
banning of works about artists from Botticelli to Van Gogh from Texan
state prisons for containing “sexually explicit images”.

The report from two free-speech organisations, the New York-based National Coalition Against Censorship and the Copenhagen-based Freemuse,
to the United Nation’s (UN) Universal Periodic Review states that the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) lists 11,851 titles banned
from its facilities. These range from the “ostensibly reasonable”, such
as How to Create a New Identity, Essential Throwing and Grappling
Techniques, and Art & Design of Custom Fixed Blades, to what it
describes as “the telling”, including Write it in Arabic, and the
“bizarre” (Arrival of the Gods: Revealing the Alien Landing Sites at
Nazca was banned for reasons of “homosexuality”)...

“Of the 11,851 total blocked titles, 7,061 were blocked for ‘deviant
sexual behaviour’ and 543 for sexually explicit images,” says the
report, naming artists including Caravaggio, Cézanne, Dallí, Picasso,
Raphael, Rembrandt and Renoir among those whose works have been kept out
of Texas state prisons.

“Anthologies on Greco-Roman art, the pre-Raphaelites, impressionism,
Mexican muralists, pop surrealism, graffiti art, art deco, art nouveau
and the National Museum of Women in the Arts are banned for the same
reason, as are numerous textbooks on pencil drawing, watercolour, oil
painting, photography, graphic design, architecture and anatomy for
artists,” states the submission, with prohibited literary works by
Gustav Flaubert, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, George Orwell,
Ovid, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Shakespeare and Alice
Walker also on the banned list.

More at the link. The eagerness to ban pornography puzzles me. These prisoners are capable of hiding razor blades in their mouths and knives in their rectums, and the authorities are worried that the images might corrupt their minds or they might waste their time masturbating??

Just a curious sign of inattention on the production line, as a Reddit commenter notes:

"Actually, these chips were dyed with green food coloring so they'd be
easy to find coming out of the fryer. Several times a day the amount of
time the chips spend in the fryer is tested, and this makes them easy
to find. Someone missed them obviously."
Source: I work there.

...they are part of a general
downward trend in Colorado that has continued despite the
legalization of medical marijuana in 2001, the commercialization of
medical marijuana in 2009 (when the industry took off after its
legal status became more secure), and the legalization of
recreational use (along with home cultivation and sharing among
adults) at the end of 2012.

DNA used to track Michelle Obama's white ancestors - "The results showed that the two families were related. The DNA testing
indicated that Melvinia’s owner’s son was the likely father of
Melvinia’s biracial child, Dolphus Shields. (Dolphus Shields is the
first lady’s great-great grandfather.)

Jane Austen used straight pins to edit a manuscript (photo at left).
"With no calculated blank spaces and no obvious way of incorporating
large revision or expansion she had to find other strategies – the three
patches, small pieces of paper, each of which was filled closely and
neatly with the new material, attached with straight pins to the precise
spot where erased material was to be covered or where an insertion was
required to expand the text."

During World War I, since Bucharest was occupied by Germany, the Romanian administration moved to Iaşi, and with them, the most valuable objects which belonged to the Romanian state. Fearing an eventual German victory, the Romanian government decided to send the Treasure abroad...

After the Romanian Army entered Bessarabia, at the time nominally part of Russia, in the early 1918, the new Soviet government severed all diplomatic relations and confiscated the Romanian treasure. The Romanian government tried to recover the treasure in 1922, but with little success. In 1935, the USSR did return a part of the archives, and in 1956 paintings and ancient objects, most notably, the Pietroasele treasure.
All the governments of Romania since World War I, regardless of their political colour, have tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a return of the gold and of the culturally valuable objects, but all Soviet and Russian governments have refused.

Posted as a reminder that during wartime, powerful and unscrupulous people amass immense fortunes.

"Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich, and Verity Studios have partnered to
develop a short film featuring 10 quadcopters in a flying dance
performance. The collaboration resulted in a unique, interactive
choreography where humans and drones move in sync. Precise computer
control allows for a large performance and movement vocabulary of the
quadcopters and opens the door to many more applications in the future."

About five miles offshore a crewmate spots, floating near the surface, a
mat of gyrating grapefruit-sized globs that stretch the length of five
city blocks, a slick so thick it appears as if you could walk on it.

These are cannonball jellyfish. Locals call them “jellyballs.” And they will be dinner.
“Jellyballs have been very, very good to me,” says King, who has worked as a state trooper for the last 20 years, and might be the only jelly-balling cop in the country. This past season was particularly robust: King and his men caught an estimated 5 million-plus pounds of cannonball jellyfish. At what King says is this year’s price (seven cents a pound), this equates to $350,000...

These brownish Cnidarians (from the Greek knide, or nettle, for their
ability to sting) are now the state of Georgia’s third biggest fishery
by volume, behind crabs and shrimp. The first cannonball jellies were
commercially harvested off the Gulf Coast of Florida in the early ’90s,
and since then Darien, Georgia, has become the epicenter of the
industry...

At the Golden Island plant, the jellies are dried and shipped to
China and Japan, where they are cut into long, thin strips and served in
salads with cabbage and teriyaki sauce. If prepared right, the
jellyfish are crunchy, like a carrot. Jellyfish are popular in China,
along with other sea creatures like geoducks (those gigantic phallic
clams from the Pacific Northwest) for similar textural reasons.

But these sorts of foods are being embraced well beyond Asia. And as
climate change and the global industrial agriculture system continue on
what many view as a doomed course, we may have no choice but to eat
foods that make sense ecologically — or can at least thrive in a changed
environment.

Excerpts from an Associated Press article published in the somewhat-agriculture-oriented StarTribune:

A weed strong enough to stop combines and resist many herbicides has
been confirmed in South Dakota for the first time, raising concerns it
could spread and cut deeply into crop production in the Upper Midwest —
one of the few areas it hadn't yet invaded.

The
threat from palmer amaranth is so great that officials in North Dakota
have named it the weed of the year, even though it has yet to be found
in the state.

The weed some officials refer to as "Satan" has moved into the Midwest
from cotton country, and was discovered in western Iowa soybean fields
last year. It's native to desert regions of the southwest U.S. and
northern Mexico... The plants can grow as tall as 7 feet, each one producing as much as a
million seeds. Its stems can grow as thick as baseball bats...

"The big concern is, in Southern states, it has developed — quickly —
resistance to a considerable amount of herbicides," Johnson said.

Amaranthus palmeri is a species of edible flowering plant in the amaranth genus. It has several common names, including Palmer's amaranth, Palmer amaranth, Palmer's pigweed, and carelessweed. It is native to most of the southern half of North America...

The leaves, stems and seeds of Palmer amaranth, like those of other amaranths, are edible and highly nutritious. Palmer amaranth was once widely cultivated and eaten by Native Americans across North America, both for its abundant seeds and as a cooked or dried green vegetable. Other related Amaranthus species have been grown as crops for their greens and seeds for thousands of years in Mexico, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, India, and China.
The plant can be toxic to livestock animals...

Palmer amaranth is considered a threat most specifically to the production of genetically modified cotton and soybean crops in the southern United States because in many places, the plant has developed resistance to glyphosate.

Siphonophores are of special scientific interest because they are composed of medusoid and polypoid zooids that are morphologically
and functionally specialized. Each zooid is an individual, but their
integration with each other is so strong, the colony attains the
character of one large organism. Indeed, most of the zooids are so
specialized, they lack the ability to survive on their own. This is
somewhat analogous to the construction and function of multicellular
organisms; because multicellular organisms have cells which, like
zooids, are specialized and interdependent, siphonophores may provide
clues regarding their evolution.

Miranda said it best: "O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!"

A sword or battleaxe spike was thrust four inches into the deposed monarch's
head by King Henry VII's forces and appears to have claimed his life at the
Battle of Bosworth, ending the War of the Roses. He suffered a total of 11 wounds around the time of his death, nine to his
skull and two to the rest of his body, according to the analysis...

Experts believe it was one of two blows to his head or an impact to his pelvis
that claimed the Plantagenet King's life, although investigators hinted that
the pelvis injuries might have been inflicted after death as an act of
vindictive battlefield celebration.

A computer simulation appears to show Richard's injuries are consistent with
accounts that his body was thrown over a horse and mutilated by angry
bystanders...

Prof Hainsworth said: "Richard's injuries represent a sustained attack or
an attack by several assailants with weapons from the later medieval period.
The wounds to the skull suggest that he was not wearing a helmet, and the
absence of defensive wounds on his arms and hands indicate that he was
otherwise still armoured at the time of his death."

Scientists have uncovered, using electron microscopy, the
organization of a single hagfish nano-sized thread, helping resolve the
mystery of why extrusion of such a long (compared to its width) thread
from the cell does not cause tangling. The thread is coiled up in a
conical “skein” in 15-20 layers. As a GTC matures, its nucleus migrates
to an extreme pole, leaving most of the cell volume packed with a
single coil of thread.

For a quantitative comparison, spider drag line silk has a tensile
strength of up to 1100 megapascals, whereas hagfish thread goes up to
800 megapascals. Steel has higher tensile strength up to 5000
megapascals but it is also much denser. Two rather unusual materials
more recently discovered, graphene and carbon nanotubes, have
stratospheric tensile strengths of 63 and 130 gigapascals.

The research was carried out by PhD student Timothy Winegard, a team
of scientists, and led by senior author Professor Douglas Fudge
at the University of Guelph.

It's not actually incorrect, but I would have been happier had the signmaker put an "s" on the "edible" to clarify that the word is being used as a noun, not as an adjective.

(I wanted to put "something else" into the pit toilet)

Both signs photographed at the University of Minnesota's Landscape Arboretum this past week.

On the subject of ambiguity I'll also mention that several discussions of the current scandals involving the National Football League have included comments by "Domestic Abuse Advocates," who presumably would not refer to themselves in that fashion...

Keen observers of our radar data probably noticed some fairly high
returns moving south over southern Illinois and central Missouri. High
differential reflectivity values as well as low correlation coefficient
values indicate these are most likely biological targets. High
differential reflectivity indicates these are oblate targets, and low
correlation coefficient means the targets are changing shape. We think
these targets are Monarch butterflies. A Monarch in flight would look
oblate to the radar, and flapping wings would account for the changing
shape! NWS St. Louis wishes good luck and a safe journey to these
amazing little creatures on their long journey south!

The front cover shows Dutch Boy, carrying his paint bucket, being
greeted by a toy lead soldier, a shoe, a plate and a light bulb. The
back cover features a hand that has made a broad brush stroke with the
admonition "'Save the surface and you save all'; Paint & Varnish"... The first page shows
the Dutch Boy talking to the lead soldier; it is followed by 14
images--7 in color and 7 in outline--of items that use lead. Items
include a light bulb (lead glass), shoes and baseballs (lead in the
rubber), and a bullet (entirely made of lead). Each outlined image was
to be filled in using the complementary color image at its side as a
guide.

Today I received an email from staff at Vice, informing me that they had posted the documentary about Agafia Lykov. I've embedded it above. For those new to this blog, or those with impaired short-term memory, the background story is here: Isolated for 40 years in the taiga. I'm currently reading the book and will probably report on that later. [reviewed here].

This is a remarkable and captivating video. The narration is modest, descriptive rather than judgmental, and consists primarily of the words of Agafia herself.

The images are awesome in terms of giving insight into a way of life that is absolutely and totally different from mine and your own, but perhaps somewhat like that of our great-grandparents.

Find the fullscreen button in the corner of the video and click it. This is well worth your time. Trust me.

This summer she has been bothered by a wild bear, which has sniffed around her huts in search of food.

'I scare it by banging on an empty bucket,' she said to a group led
by Vladimir Makuta, head of Tashtagol district of Kemerovo region, who
flew in by helicopter to bring her essential supplies of hay, grain, and
potatoes, while also cutting firewood.

In some time the bear will hibernate but this is not the only
problem. 'I don't know about how will I get through the coming winter,'
said Agafya, who will be 70 on 23 April next year (though some accounts
say she has reached this milestone already).

'I didn't manage to finish half of the hay I need for my goats, and
some of them are not giving milk. I have six goats now, and I can only
milk a couple of them.

23 September 2014

"One of the finest achievements of European furniture making, this
cabinet is the most important product from Abraham (1711--1793) and
David Roentgen's (1743--1807) workshop. A writing cabinet crowned with a
chiming clock, it features finely designed marquetry panels and
elaborate mechanisms that allow for doors and drawers to be opened
automatically at the touch of a button. Owned by King Frederick William
II, the Berlin cabinet is uniquely remarkable for its ornate decoration,
mechanical complexity, and sheer size."

"Elegant furniture incorporating intriguing mechanical devices was a
trademark of the Roentgen workshop, which from 1768 until about 1793 was
one of Europe's most successful cabinetmaking enterprises. The
distinguished design and the innovative way prefabricated elements such
as the detachable legs were assembled make this table an example par
excellence of David Roentgen's ingenious creations. His objects are an
amalgamation of superior technical skills, sophisticated looks, high
quality materials, and multiple functions. Roentgen's patrons sought
adaptable furnishings that could perform manifold tasks. This piece is a
console, a desk for writing and reading, and a game table for cards and
chess with a concealed spring-driven backgammon box. Yet when closed it
took up only a small amount of space in the intimate interiors popular
during the Age of Enlightenment. A set of eighteenth-century game pieces
- twenty-nine stamped wooden medallions illustrating European monarchs
and historical views - are associated with the table. "

I had a delightful time at the 50th reunion of my high school class in Minneapolis. Amazingly, about 2/3 of the class returned, arriving from as far away as California, Florida, Montana, Vermont, Texas, and nine other states for three days of renewing the best friendships of our lives.

15 September 2014

Before their match with the United States team, the New Zealanders performed a traditional "haka"

The various types of haka include whakatu waewae, tutu ngarahu and peruperu. The peruperu is characterised by leaps during which the legs are pressed under the body. In former times, the peruperu was performed before a battle
in order to invoke the god of war and to discourage and frighten the
enemy. It involved fierce facial expressions and grimaces, poking out of
the tongue, eye bulging, grunts and cries, and the waving of weapons.
If the haka was not performed in total unison, this was regarded as a
bad omen for the battle. Often, warriors went naked into battle, apart
from a plaited flax belt around the waist.

The tutu ngarahu also involves jumping, but from side to side, while in the whakatu waewae no jumping occurs. Another kind of haka performed without weapons is the ngeri,
the purpose of which was to motivate the warriors psychologically. The
movements are very free, and each performer is expected to be expressive
of their feelings. Manawa wera haka were generally associated with funerals or other occasions involving death. Like the ngeri they were performed without weapons, and there was little or no choreographed movement.

The Big Zac variety tends to have “megablooms,”
with individual tomatoes growing fused together. MacCoy said his
record-breaking tomato looks like five individual fruits wrapped into
one.

He started
the plants on April 15 indoors, then moved them to his greenhouse in
early May. From there he carefully pruned the plants of all other growth
except the vine supporting his tomato, using a theory that a small
plant would produce larger tomatoes.

Dehydrated
chicken manure, kelp meal, humic acid, triple-10 fertilizer and other
“stuff like that” kept the soil nourished, said MacCoy. Even the
watering was by design: he watered the plant by hand using rainwater he
collected in a barrel. When the tomato’s weight became too much for the
plant, Sara bought a pair of pantyhose to use as a sling to support it.

I've never been one to share the agonies of those who despair over the death of languages, except insofar as the loss of ancient languages renders certain documents and artworks unreadable. An entry at The Dish discusses the inclusion of Yiddish as a threatened language:

Frankel comments on how secular Judaism has contributed to the death
of Yiddish and a simultaneous loss of traditional Jewish identity:

The secular community is dead, dead, dead.
There’s no Yiddish press, no Yiddish theater [not quite accurate since
there is one still-vibrant group, the National Yiddish
Theater-Folksbiene]. Dead, dead, dead. There were hundreds of Sholem
Aleichem schools, Peretz schools. Where are they? How many Yiddish books
are being published? The secular people dominated everything and now
they’ve lost. Hasidim are pushing everyone to be more religious, more
Jewish.

Rabbi Frankel’s bemoaning of the potential extinction of Yiddish
illuminates a greater issue: The language has become synonymous with
Orthodox Judaism and has lost its meaning within the secular parts of
the faith.

"Excarnation in Texas" is an essay exploring a body farm in Texas. This isn't the body farm I'm familiar with in Tennessee, but it serves a similar purpose:

Kate, an associate professor at Texas State University in San
Marcos, does most of her work at their Forensic Anthropology Center
(FACTS)—the centerpiece of which is the Forensic Anthropology Research
Facility (FARF), the largest of America’s five “body farms.” Including
Kate, FACTS has three full-time researchers, a rotating crew of
anthropology graduate students and undergraduate volunteers, and a
steady influx of cadaver donations from both individuals and their next
of kin—brought in from Texas hospitals, hospices, medical examiners’
offices, and funeral homes. When I arrive, Kate is helping lead a
weeklong forensics workshop for undergrads, spread out across five
excavation sites where skeletal remains have been buried to simulate
“crime scenes.”...

While grad students carry out the “intake” and “placement” of the bodies outdoors, about twenty-five undergradsvolunteer
to process the remains for free, from disarticulating the sun-dried
cadavers to soaking them in the kettles to scrubbing the last bits of
cartilage off with their gloved hands. They remove tendons with
hemostats and toothbrushes, then they wash the bones again by hand,
adding Dawn if still greasy. Finally, they leave them out on countertops
to dry...

Perhaps surprisingly, his immediate
reaction to the photos, and the details of the research—scientists
“captured the vultures jumping up and down on the woman’s body, breaking
some of her ribs”—was one of pride. “Just the amount of damage done to
the body—it was hours, literally hours,
and it was clean,” he says. “It was just this huge amount of
unthought-of information.” In his enthusiasm, Ted posted a link on
Facebook saying, “Hey, look! Mom got eaten by vultures! Awesome!”

In a third-grade classroom at her
elementary school, Mary was online and saw the note from her youngest
brother. She clicked on the link—and had a typical Robinson family
reaction: “I was like ‘Oh, cool! They’re talking about her!’” Then she saw the pictures. “And it was ‘Oh, there’s Mom’s face! There’s her teeth! Oh, there’s her ribs! Oh, wow.’”

Mary was deeply hurt when her friends
and colleagues at work were unable to relate to her excitement at the
news. “I have just hit revulsion, revulsion, revulsion—and it’s very
lonely and hard. This is awesome—but it’s so out-of-the-box, there’s no paradigm. That’s yourmom? What?”

12 September 2014

“Jerez” is the hispanicized version of “Sherish” which was its Moorish
name when the town was under Islamic rule. The English speaking world
modified the Arabic into “Sherry,” Jerez being the origin of Sherry
wines.

New Scientist provides this image of a 24-year old woman who appears to have a form of cerebellar aplasia, with surprisingly minimal symptoms:

The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to
the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in
Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told doctors
she'd had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother
reported that she hadn't walked until she was 7 and that her speech
only became intelligible at the age of 6.

Doctors did a CAT scan and immediately
identified the source of the problem – her entire cerebellum was missing. The space where it should be was empty of
tissue.

The image above was generated by Google Street View* (via Digital Spy). Other interesting examples can be viewed at Neatorama and the links provided there.

*Addendum - a tip of the blogging cap to reader Drabkikker, who knew that the "half-cat" in the image above is a product of Photoshop, not a panorama fail. The original image (from 2003, well before Google Street View) is available at Hoax-Slayer.

The history of drinking vocabulary is an exercise in semantics rather
than sociolinguistics. Terms for being drunk can’t usually be explained
by referring to such variables as age, gender, social class, occupation,
or regional background. Being drunk cuts across barriers. The list
below shows only the occasional indication of a class preference (such
as genteel whiffled vs thieves' cant suckey), and occupational origins are seen only in some nautical expressions (three sheets, oversparred, up the pole, tin hat, honkers), though
the etymology is not always definite. There are very few formal terms
in the list, apart from a few expressions fostered by the law
(intoxicated, over the limit), and some early scholarly words (inebriate(d), temulent, ebrious). Local regional variations are sometimes apparent, such as from Scotland (fou, strut, swash, blootered, swacked), England (bottled, pissed, rat­arsed), and Australia (blue, rotten, shickery, plonked, on one’s ear); and
since the eighteenth century most new words in this semantic field have
started out in the United States. But it’s rare to find a word that
stays in one country for long, and these days online slang dictionaries
have largely broken down geographical boundaries....

There seems to be a universal trend to avoid stating the obvious. To describe someone as simply drunk, in drink, or in liquor is accurate but evidently uninspiring. One fruitful vein is to find terms that characterize drunken appearance (owl­eyed, pie­eyed, cock­eyed, lumpy, blue, lit) or behaviour, especially erratic movement (slewed, bumpsy, reeling ripe, tow­ row, rocky, on one’s ear, zigzag, tipped, looped) or lack of any movement at all (stiff, paralytic). Another is mental state, such as being muddled (fuddled, muzzed, queer, woozy), elated (high­flown, wired, pixilated), or worn down (whittled, half­shaved, rotten, crocked, the worse for wear)....

These days, though, the leading question for the lexicologist has to be: what exactly is the lexicon of drink? Many of the words formerly associated with drinking are now associated with drugs, such as high, loaded, pie­eyed, piped, potted, wasted, and blasted. Often
it is simply unclear, without further context, what state a person is
in. Indeed, sometimes there is a three-way ambiguity, as a further
meaning has emerged that is to do with neither alcohol nor drugs. If
someone says they are zonked, are they drunk, high, or just tired out?

Ohaguro is the custom of dyeing one's teeth black. It was most popular in Japan until the Meiji era. Tooth painting was also known and practiced in the southeastern parts of China and Southeast Asia. Dyeing was mainly done by married women, though occasionally men did it as well. It was also beneficial, as it prevented tooth decay, in a similar fashion to modern dental sealants.

In 1873, the empress of Japan made a radical beauty statement, appearing in public with white teeth. For centuries, tooth blackening, known as ohaguro, signified wealth and sexual maturity especially for women in Japanese society, and they would drink an iron-based black dye tempered with cinnamon and other aromatic spices to achieve the lacquered look.

Each panellist has a buzzer,
with the sounds of all four often being based on a theme. They are
demonstrated at the beginning of the programme, but are sometimes
changed in some way for repeated use. Davies' buzzer usually subverts
the theme established by the preceding three. Comical twists include in
the ninth episode of series B (Bats), when all the first 3 buzzers were
bells, then Alan's buzzer turned out to be a male voice (Leslie Phillips)
saying "Well hello! Ding dong!" ...

In episode 5 of Series A, rather than a comical buzzer, Davies set off
the forfeit alarm, (suggesting he sets one every time he offers an
answer) meaning he started the show on -10 points before a question was
asked (it was later changed to the sound of a duck quacking)...

Sometimes questions are based on the buzzers themselves, usually
Davies'. For example, one of his buzzer noises the Series D episode
"Descendants" sounded like a Clanger,
and the panel had to try and guess what was being said (the answer
being "Oh sod it, the bloody thing's stuck again.") In the Series F
episode "Fakes and Frauds," all the buzzers sounded like ordinary
household objects, but then turned out to be the sound of the superb lyrebird mimicking the noises. Davies's however, was again an exception; his buzzer, which sounded like a telephone, really was a telephone and not a lyrebird mimicking one.

[A] 68-year-old Ohio businessman has stockpiled more than 8,000 of the old-fashioned credit-card-processing machines, known for their tendency to scrape the fingers of the merchants who operate them.
Mr. Matthews keeps the machines boxed up individually on the shelves of his 12,000-square-foot warehouse, ready to be shipped at a moment's notice. He has enough spare parts to assemble another 2,000 if need be...

But Mr. Matthews has been ringing up a few more sales lately. He credits a series of high-profile security breaches—including an incident that prompted restaurant chain P.F. Chang's China Bistro Inc. in June to start using manual imprinters at its 200 restaurants—for easing the knuckle-buster bust, at least temporarily...

He says he recently was forced to pay cash at a bar while vacationing in Lake Tahoe because a sudden storm knocked out power and the restaurant didn't have a knuckle buster on hand.
The devices are also sometimes used by merchants who don't have immediate access to an electronic system, such as a car-service driver or a seller at a street fair.

I searched the database and found 2,129 sports teams that reference
Braves, Chiefs, Indians, Orangemen, Raiders, Redmen, Reds, Redskins,
Savages, Squaws, Tribe and Warriors, as well as tribe names such as
Apaches, Arapahoe, Aztecs, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Chinooks, Chippewas,
Choctaws, Comanches, Eskimos, Mohawks, Mohicans, Seminoles, Sioux and
Utes. (Not all teams with the names “Raiders” and “Warriors” are
referencing Native Americans, but we spot-checked 20 schools with each
name and a majority of each did.) Some 92 percent of those 2,129 team
names belong to high schools (the rest were college, semi-pro, pro and
amateur league teams). Of all the active high schools in the database,
8.2 percent have Native American team names.

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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About Me

I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Readers - especially old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, and long-lost relatives - are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net